A Cause, Many Doctors and Endless Bokeh

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Again, and again, for me it is another form of sequencing, continuity is always the aim.
When dealing with any type of series/sequence, any kind of aesthetics or anesthesia should be holistic, it is not about the qualitative value of the individual forming units or components of the sequence rather how these elements culminate into a coherent, streamlined and undisrupted sequence.In other words when working any series it is not about the “beauty” individual (a-tom), it is about the “beauty” the collective.Please refer to this article in which this concept was covered.

What pushed this sequence further is philanthropy; it was a campaign for raising awareness in preventing breast cancer. In my humble opinion every one of us should engage in any sort of activism and in absolutely any cause that reverberates into “public/collective” good. Again and again it is about the whole and not the individual.

The Technical Side

These series where shot at/for Haykel Hospital on 5 days. Logistically it was impossible to have the featured doctors there on one shooting session.

The hallway, leading to operation theatre and where all the photos were taken has a unique and very tricky mixture of incident daylight as well as artificial lighting. This mixture was lost due to an extension of hospital building.

The camera was fixed in location, the lens was shot wide open at aperture 2.0, a very shallow field at 135mm. I opted to move doctors into the preset focusing instead of refocusing (magnification and most lens’ optical characteristics vary on different stages of the focusing range even on a fixed prime lens)

The reference custom white balance was measured using an X-Rite ColorChecker Passport, and white balance was not compensated while outside light fluctuated due to passing clouds. All sessions where taken in morning light, and the natural light featuring a naturally diffused light since the windows are on the West.

Background was to a certain extent orchestrated given the colors of the outfits of some people passing in the hallway. So I would tell some passing wearing blue, for example: “please can you stand still a bit to the left”

All photos are absolutely unaltered, direct from camera JPG. Not a single pixel retouched (cloning, healing), only significant shifts in white balance were rectified to toward the reference (one or two photos) . I picked the Nikon D3 for this job since its “vivid” color setting is unmatched even by later models in terms of color saturation and black density. (it will take a lot of time until sensors will come anywhere near from the “Slide Film” in terms of saturation and black density)